VACCINATION.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2122, 23 February 1870, Page 2

VACCINATION.

To the. Editor of the Erening Star. Sir, I have been somewhat surprised that the subject of vaccination which has for some time past received considerable attention from all classes of the community at Home lias hitherto awakened no public interest here. Headers of Home papers will not have failed to observe that despite compulsory vaccination, smallpox has made its appearance, and been steadily on the increase in various parts of the country ; and as far as I have been able to form an opinion, those who had been previously vaccinated fared but little better, ‘if any, than those who had not. But in addition to the above I have observed mmy apparently well authenticated reports of cases in which healthy children upon being vaccinated have become affected with various diseases, previously unknown in the families to which they belonged, and moreover that several of those cases terminated fatally. Under these circumstances it is not to be wondered at if a considerable section of the British public lose faith in the virtue of vaccination as at present practised, and prefer to suffer line and imprisonment rather than submit their children- to the presumed risk. It is just possible that after a given length of time the matter originally taken from the cow may not only lose its original virtue, but absorb a certain amount of unhealthy and injurious foreign matter as to render it absolutely necessary that unless the vaccine matter be taken direct from the original source, disease and probably death must ensue instead of the desired benefit. I think under these circumstances, that the question of compulsory vaccination might well be ventilated in oiu public press, and by medical men and others competent to give an opinion.—Yours, &c., PATE!!. P.S.—l enclose extract from a recent English paper. —P. ♦ Extract enclosed in above : Is Va< (..'IXATjon Deletkuioi's? —A correspondent of Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, observing that Mr John Skelton, a medical gentleman of fourteen years’ pi'hctice, has been fined for refusing to have Ids child vaccinated, gives his experience on this subject as follows “A case of vaccination in my family will, 1 think, illustrate a little the truth of Mr Skelton’s objection to vaccination. 1 have three children, a baby of live months, a little daughter about two years old, and a son about four and a-half years old. Some two months ago the baby was vaccinated. A short time after the operation sores appeared pretty well all over

it. The little boy was soon in tho same state. They were not large sores, and both are now free from externally. My little daughter, however, has had her head and body* I in gut almost say, covered with large sores, said to be chicken pox. Some of these sores were nearly as large as a f rthing. Some idea of her state may be formed by the fact that the sores smelt so badly that her movher was almost unable to go near her. The child lias been very ill, and has also had a lit. It never bad a lit before. She is now almost recovered ; but any one interested can still sec, from the sores yet on her, what she has endured. I know nothing concerning vaccination but this. Before vaccination my children have been in perfect health ; since vaccination they have had disease, and have been subject to attacks of illness to which apparently they were not subject before vaccination.”